Who is Pixelrage

Thanks for visiting - here's a rough bio I've put together in spirit of the creation of my first Squidowho-themed Squidoo lens. This entire page is simply a mish-mosh of my interests and other things.

The Early Years

I was born on July 26, 1978 and have lived in the NYC metro area all my life (Bergen County, NJ to be exact). I grew up as an only child. Most of my family lives locally, and many of them (including my mother) immigrated here from Istria, Croatia and Trieste, Italy.

As a kid, I was a complete fanatic of Saturday morning and weekday afternoon cartoons, especially the (now horribly cliche) Transformers and G.I. Joe series (speaking of which, did you know of the upcoming G.I. Joe movie?!) I was also a hardcore collector of baseball cards and other great stuff, like Garbage Pail Kids, TMNT cards and M.U.S.C.L.E Figures.

One of the most profound possessions I've ever owned was the Nintendo Entertainment System, of which I've spent countless hours playing. If you're bored or want to put your workday's 3:00-5:00 drudgery to better use*, why not just spend the day playing classic NES games online? (*I take no responsibility for possible repercussions therein)


Between Then and Now

Back to mature topics: I went to college at St. Peter's in Jersey City in 1996, and began as a computer science major. After spending day after grueling day toiling over Turbo Pascal and Quick Basic, I decided that being a CS major sucked, and jumped into Marketing Management the year afterward.

Going to college in the mid 90's was a fun time. It was the dawn of the internet age, where everyone was excited to have a "free e-mail address," connected to the 'net using Hyperterminal, sitting around in the computer room chatting on mIRC on a 486 running Windows 3.1, and being introduced to your very first spam email, which hadn't existed until the late 90s.

I wound up getting my first job at Merrill Lynch (remember them?!) in Jersey City, which became one of the greatest jobs I've ever had in my life. I began my professional career using Photoshop, Illustrator & basic desktop publishing in '98 as a graphic designer, and got into the web more than ever that same year (wish I had known how many one-word .com's were still available that year!!) As for my job, the company suffered financial issues due to a bad economy in the year 2000, and I wound up having to get a job elsewhere.


Now-ish

Several crappy jobs later, here I am. I'm finally working at a decent position as an internet marketer, and spending a majority of my time in this wonderful age of social networking, SEO and affiliate marketing.

I've been a big fan of the New Jersey Devils and have gotten sore at their move to the Prudential Center in Newark, NJ. I don't play a lot of sports (it takes up too much valuable computer time), and have never been one to sit around and watch football for hours, like mostly everyone else I know. I'm an affiliate marketer, I'd rather be making money :) [someone can steal that for a bumper sticker]. My career goal in life is still to own my own business, preferably through a mix of freelancing and affiliate marketing.

If you've actually made it this far in my bio, seriously - you deserve a gold star .

I've been a regular loyal member of Squidoo since April 17, 2007 - it's been a part of my daily routine since then! I first stumbled upon Squidoo when I saw its logo in a social bookmarking toolbar on someone's site. It's still one of the strangest logos I've seen in my life. Anyway, as the months passed by, I started accumulating dozens of lenses.

As of Fall 2007, I had about 110 lenses and 45 groups spread across 2 accounts (one is for entertainment lenses, this one is for everything else). Squidoo helps pay my annual URL bill, since I own about 310 domain names...and it's quite expensive to upkeep!

Giant Squid

On September 19, 2007, I was chosen to be a Giant Squid (for those who don't know, it's a merit from Squidoo for having 50 or more notable lenses). In the Summer of 2008, I've finally joined the 100-lens crew, although Squidoo didn't give me the official title for it - which I was quite angry with.

What I'm Up To

I've become a big tutorial creator on Squidoo, as of late. I'll admit, I'm not a big Squidoo earner by any means. Many people ask if my top-ranked LCD HDTV lens is making tons of cash - in actuality, it barely makes a dollar a month, even though it gets a lot of traffic. It goes to show that monetary success usually does not come through non-niches!

What the hell is a "Pixelrage?!"

It's simply a word I made up many years ago, when thinking of a message board username. I originally wanted to name my freelance business "Pixelrage." Unfortunately, someone else in the world obviously had the same idea as me, and registered the .com, which I still want badly.

11/6/08: My webmaster tools bundle got awarded with a Bundle of the Day on YouBundle.com (what is YouBundle?!):




11/3/08: I got my 200th Squidoo fan...it's naturegirl7 - thanks!